The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia

by Donald Rayfield

  6

  The Great Tibetan Expedition

  He paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength; he goeth on to meet the armed men.

  JOB 39.21

  In 1879 Russia and China were confronting each other. The chargé d’affaires in Peking, Koyander, warned Przhevalsky that the Chinese ‘were less to be relied on than ever’. But he was turning forty and risks excited him: ‘Perhaps the main chance of success is to be found in the risk itself.’ He also knew that he was in a race, not just with the British, but with Count Széchenyi, who was heading for Lhasa from the capital of Kansu, Hsi-ning. His final preparations were thorough. He bought a flock of sheep to be the rearguard and a guarantee of fresh meat. (Other travellers to Tibet, the pandits, had used sheep to carry small packs as well.) The twenty-three camels were loaded with two-and-a-half hundredweight of sugar, forty pounds of dried fruit, a crate of brandy and a crate of sherry, brick tea and dzamba. Przhevalsky had personally boiled up wild strawberry jam for the Dalai Lama. The staple diet was to be mutton stew and game; five Cossacks were to do the cooking by rote. Two Mongolian sailcloth tents were to house the expedition. (In Tsaidam Przhevalsky bought a ger for himself, Eklon and Roborovsky.) The party was to wear sailcloth and cotton in summer, sheepskin in winter. Felt groundsheets, leather pillows, flannel blankets and plenty of sheepskins were their bedding.

  Przhevalsky’s scientific equipment was still meagre. He refused to take cameras; Roborovsky was to be the expedition’s artist. He had chronometers, surveying compasses, maximum-minimum thermometers and simple instruments for measuring humidity and altitude. Five gallons of spirit and 1,500 sheets of blotting paper were to cope with the specimens of fauna and flora. Przhevalsky had spent 1,400 roubles on ‘beads for the natives’: guns, watches, mirrors, magnets, a battery and a telephone (which were not appreciated), and tinted pictures of Russian actresses (which were popular).

  They were more heavily armed than before. Each man was issued with a Berdan carbine and two Smith and Wesson revolvers, and carried a bayonet and forty rounds of ammunition on his person. The camels carried seven more rifles, a hundredweight of powder, 9,000 rounds of ammunition, and the loads were balanced by distributing four hundredweight of lead shot in the packs. Przhevalsky was determined not to be stranded defenceless; he also took twelve extra camels, eight for riding, four in reserve; the gentry and Abdul rode on five horses.

  Before setting off, the expedition spent three weeks on firearms drill. ‘This,’ said Przhevalsky, ‘was our guarantee of safety in the depths of the Asiatic deserts, the best of all Chinese passports … and if our little group had not been like a bristling hedgehog which can prick the paws of the biggest wild beast, the Chinese could have found a thousand opportunities to annihilate us …’ In April 1879, as the snow melted, Mirzash once more led the way through Dzungaria on a route skirting populated areas to the oases of Barköl and Hami.

  Przhevalsky had not gone a mile from Zaysansk when Kirghiz hunters brought in the skin of an animal that they called the kurtag, and which the Turghud Mongols knew as the takhi. The chief of the Zaysansk post, Tikhonov, handed the skin to Przhevalsky, who realized that this was the primitive Mongolian wild horse, so often reported and rumoured in Mongolia and Tibet, but never before seen by a European.

  The skin had come from a young animal, with the stocky body, short legs and large skull of the Mongolian ponies. But it was no ordinary horse. It had no forelock, its mane was short and erect like a donkey’s. Its tail was more like a kulan’s than a horse’s, the hair beginning well below the base, yet it was not a kulan or any other race of wild ass. Przhevalsky noted its large, powerful, horse-like hooves, its deep-set eyes and short ears, and the enormous teeth that would have suited a cart-horse better than an animal of barely twelve hands. The skin and skull were enough to tell Przhevalsky that the horse was no feral escapee, but a specimen of the more powerful, bigger-brained primitive horse that once ranged the Eurasian steppes. With a perspicacity that scientists have only recently confirmed, Przhevalsky sent the skin back to Petersburg as a race of the tarpan. The tarpan is—or rather was—the only extant primitive horse. In the southern steppes of Russia, one or two small herds and the occasional isolated stallion were all that was left of the great prehistoric herds. In Przhevalsky’s day the peasant settlers were hunting down the last remnants of the tarpan, for the stallions would often raid domestic herds and abduct the mares. Larger, more sandy-coloured and even wilder than the tarpan, the takhi, or Przhevalsky’s horse, was in fact the same species of equid, a shaggy muscular form that had adapted itself to the rigours of the Dzungarian deserts, to living for days without water, subsisting on clumps of wormwood and saltbrush, to fighting off wolves and rivals. The Przhevalsky horse is the ‘edge form’ of a species that flourished in the Pleistocene and which had survived in a pocket too remote for man to domesticate.

  Przhevalsky had rediscovered one of the wild strains from which our modern horse breeds are, in toughness and fierceness, a degenerate descendant. The takhi of Mongol folklore, the short-legged, thick-necked symbol of speed and endurance painted by Palaeolithic man in caves from the Atlantic to eastern Siberia, was still alive. But not until mid-May of 1879 did Przhevalsky catch sight of his horse, Equus przewalskii, in the Dzungarian desert, and never was he to come within shooting distance of one. The wariness of the takhi, which had preserved it from capture and examination over the millennia was undiminished. Over the centuries man had only domesticated the half-castes from mares covered by a wild takhi stallion, which gave the ponies of the Mongols since Genghis Khan their legendary stamina.

  Przhevalsky’s route into Dzungaria led east to Lake Ulüngur and the town of Bulun Tokhoi (Fu-hai), and then followed the River Urungu up into the Altai mountains. Here they were to turn south across successive ranges and deserts to Barköl, before breaking through the Tien Shan to Hami, Tsaidam and Tibet. Przhevalsky and Eklon rode ahead with Mirzash, three echelons of camels, each managed by two Cossacks or two soldiers, followed; Roborovsky, Kolomeytsov and Abdul brought up the rear with the sheep and a party of dogs from Zaysansk that had volunteered as sentries for the journey.

  It was cold; five days out a blizzard struck. But as they moved towards Lake Ulüngur along a valley, with the Altai to the north and the Saur range to the south, with its patches of larch or birch woods and occasional crab-apples and meadowsweet, life seemed idyllic. Lake Ulüngur was an oddity: it was fresh and drinkable, although un drained. Only a few hundred yards of land separated it from the River Irtysh and drainage to the Arctic Ocean. As they arrived, the ice was melting. But few birds, save a flock of Bewick’s swans, came to disturb the reedy marshes and the tamarisk-covered hills. The lake was as if untouched since Rubruquis, sent by Louis XI to make contact with the Mongols in Karakorum, had passed by in 1253. There was nothing to hold Przhevalsky’s attention; he moved round the lake to Bulun Tokhoi. Once the focal centre of Dzungaria, it had been ravaged by the Tungans; only 100 Chinese soldiers lived there, enduring its notorious mosquito-ridden summers.

  Przhevalsky went up the River Urungu, which cuts through the desert, feeding the lake with the rainfall of the mountains in the east. For twenty days the expedition followed the river, mountain timber rushing past them. The water created a strip of life in an organically dead land. Boar and wolves scavenged along its banks. Sea-eagles fished and woodpeckers hammered at the timber. Here and there a few tulips were in flower. One draw of the fishing net gave the men two hundredweight of bullheads, each a foot long.

  But signs of tragedy overlaid these impressions. Most of the grass had been trampled out of existence, and the trees were gnawed and barkless. Dung and still-rotting carcases that the wolves had not been able to finish told what had happened. The previous year 9,000 Kazakh nomads had migrated from Russia to Chinese territory; they had tried to make for Guchen, directly from Bulun Tokhoi. The desert proved impassable; their flocks and herds died of thirst. The survivors retreated to the Urungu fo
r the winter, stripped it of its vegetation and left it strewn with cadavers. The devastation sobered Przhevalsky; he could only think of what the Mongol hordes must have left in their wake across the fields of Europe. Now no one but one or two Turghud pickets lived on the Urungu.

  They came to the Guchen road; Przhevalsky avoided it and continued up the River Buluguk higher into the mountains, until finally he had to break out southwards. Near the pass out of the valley was a lake, Gashun Nor. Here Przhevalsky stopped for his first good day’s hunting. Wild boar roamed the reeds and the vines; one of them was a 400-pounder, another leapt at Przhevalsky and dropped dead only at the fourth bullet. He thought of an ingenious idea for making his carbine more lethal: he had the Berdan bullets drilled out and the hole filled with sulphur and potassium chlorate, so that the gun now shot an explosive dum-dum into the wild boar. Only in Tibet, Przhevalsky reflected, were large game animals tame enough to come within range of ordinary bullets.

  They were now in the southern Dzungarian desert. Here Przhevalsky found the fine-grained, wind-eroded yellow loess so typical of China—whether in the form of grotesquely sculptured cliffs, or dust more treacherous than sand-dunes, or alluvial silt in the lowlands. In Dzungaria, where loess met water, it made the oases extraordinarily fertile, for it was rich in fossilized organic material and had a good porous structure. Despite the winter cold and the spring dust storms, the slight summer rains thus turned the oases along the Tien Shan from Kulja to Urumchi and around Guchen and Barköl almost into a cultivated belt.

  The dust storms were trying. The morning sun heated the east side of the rocks and the air rose turbulently against the cold western side, giving rise to regular squalls of sand and dust that infiltrated everything. Somehow vegetation survived; there were no proper trees, but the saksaul (saltwood, Haloxylon) succeeded in the pitted sand. From the Caspian to China, from Siberia to Afghanistan, the saksaul is the desert’s chief fodder and best fuel. Camels love its brittle, leafless twigs; fire flares up even on the green timber. Where saksaul grows, so, often, does dyrisun (Lasiagrostis splendens), a wiry sharp-edged grass which forms clumps nine feet high; camels thrive on it and birds and mammals can nest in it. Of the 160 species of bird Przhevalsky saw, only ten, such as the desert jay and a small screech owl which preyed on reptiles, were tough enough to live in the desert the whole year round. In any case, the main migratory routes followed the water-holes along the mountain chains to the west. There were even fewer mammal species: only thirteen lived here—sand marmots, the diminutive, bulbous-nosed saiga antelope, the kulan or wild ass, and the wild horse, as Przhevalsky now knew.

  Not far from Gashun Nor he saw two herds of Equus przewalskii, groups of five to fifteen mares led by a stallion. His account of the journey relates:

  Kurtags are in general extremely cautious; they are also endowed with excellent scent, hearing and sight … They are met with rather seldom; and in any case live in the wildest parts of the desert from which they visit the water-holes … probably they can go without water for long periods, getting by on the succulent vegetation of the saltlands. Hunting wild horses is extremely difficult and is possible only in winter when snow falls on the waterless desert. At least then the hunter can’t die of thirst. But he will be sorely tried every day by the severe sub-zero temperatures … such a hunt would mean going out for hundreds of miles for a month at a time. I personally came across only two herds of wild horses. One of them let us creep up to within a marksman’s distance, but the animals caught my companion’s scent at not less than a thousand yards and withdrew. The stallion ran ahead, his tail arched, his neck stretched out in an utterly equine way; seven females, probably, followed him. The animals stopped at times, crowded together, looked in my direction and sometimes kicked out at each other; then they set off again at a fast trot and finally vanished …

  Przhevalsky’s conjectures were confirmed by later Russian travellers; the wild horse was limited to a small area on the borders of Dzungaria and western Mongolia. They remained elusive. Except for the brothers Grumm-Grzhimaylo who shot two stallions, Russian explorers such as Shishmaryov, Obruchev and Kozlov brought back specimens which had been killed by native hunters. Not until the twentieth century were any specimens of Equus przewalskii captured alive, to be sent to Falz-Fein’s Ukrainian estate, Askania Nova.

  At Gashun Nor, Mirzash left Przhevalsky: this was as far as he could guide them. The expedition took on a Turghud guide to Barköl and set off south. The extraordinary visibility made orientation easy: the Baitik mountains were visible, dust and sand permitting, 120 miles off; the lack of tracks did not matter. But when they reached the mountains and had to find the best passes, the guide proved useless, leading them from one gorge to another. For the first mistakes Przhevalsky thrashed him; finally he dismissed him and crossed the successive ranges of hills as best he might, until they struck the road to Barköl, a branch of the ‘Northern Road’ along the Tien Shan foothills.

  Nearer the Tien Shan the landscapes were less arid. Kulans grazed the southern slopes; potentilla and Iris tenuifolia were in flower. Few Kirghiz or Turghud grazed their flocks here, for the Tungans or the avenging Chinese army had killed them or chased them off. In the Tien Shan there were no nomads at all; immigrants were walking from Kansu, a hoe and a bundle of possessions on their shoulders, to reinforce the handful of Chinese peasants who had escaped massacre fifteen years ago. Through Abdul, Przhevalsky tried to ask directions of them, but he was met with blank hostility. Soon the snows of the Tien Shan peaks were in sight and the expedition rode along the carriage road into the oasis of Barköl and pitched camp twelve miles outside the town.

  So far, so good: Przhevalsky wrote to his brother Vladimir (in a letter sent back with Mirzash): ‘Even the itch has passed almost completely … Give me health and luck and all will be done … Sometimes on special occasions after a good hunt we indulge ourselves with jam from Otradnoye and cordials from Smolensk. We are driving about fifteen sheep behind the caravan and eat two every three days. But now we are eating boar.’

  The journey had been almost leisurely: fifteen miles a day, covered in six or seven hours; bearings mapped without interference; Cossacks taking turns to kill and cook a sheep, to graze the camels and horses at night and load them in the morning. At the end of May there was plenty of grass around Barköl; the camels were tied in pairs and the horses hobbled, free to forage. Przhevalsky wrote up his diary and observations, Eklon and Kolomeytsov skinned the mammals and washed the skins down with arsenic soap, and Roborovsky dried plants and drew the local inhabitants and landscapes. Sometimes curious Mongols would visit the camp; the Cossacks often struck up a friendship or gave the Mongols meat in exchange for their help in fetching water and dried dung or in rounding up stray camels.

  Dinner was the event of the day. It began with soup, thickened with rice or millet; the next course was game or fish; the entrée was invariably mutton. ‘I doubt,’ wrote Przhevalsky in a letter ‘whether any gourmet eats the various refinements of European cuisine with the relish with which we drink brick tea and eat dzamba and mutton lard.’ The brackish water that smelt of tallow after being carried all day in the skins of the slaughtered sheep did not deter him. ‘The traveller must seek within himself the strength to fight all these disadvantages and not try to get rid of them by various palliatives.’

  In the less arid hills, Przhevalsky would stop for a day’s hunting; shooting lasted from dawn to ten in the morning and the rest of the day would be spent shoeing the horses, patching the camels’ heels with raw hide, and preparing the day’s kill. The night always began early and everyone slept with loaded revolvers to hand.

  At Barköl Przhevalsky forfeited this independence from his surroundings. Abdul and a Cossack rode into town to buy supplies at the market and to find a guide across the Tien Shan to Hami. They found the governor of Barköl distinctly cool. Soon a guide arrived, with an escort of six soldiers, more an impediment than an honour to Przhevalsky, for surveying would now be
barred. (Fortunately, earlier Russian expeditions had mapped the Barköl-Hami road in 1875 and 1877.) After only two days’ rest, the expedition left Barköl’s pastures and arable land to cross the Tien Shan ridge, here at its narrowest. It was already June, but the poplar leaves were just unfurling to greet the first heavy rains.

  Soon they reached the pei lu, the Northern Road, which ran from Hami to Urumchi and there joined the ‘southern road’ to make the only usable artery connecting the Ili Valley and Kashgaria with China proper. The road had been in use for 1,600 years and was well posted and engineered. It climbed 3,000 feet to cross the Tien Shan, before descending 6,000 feet to the oasis of Hami. The mountains were almost perpendicular. There was a dramatic transition from the aridity of Dzungaria to the larches and fires with their thickets of spiraea, honeysuckle and wild currants. At 9,000 feet the trees petered out and the first flowers of the alpine pastures—violets, forget-me-nots, paeonia anomala—were blooming. Przhevalsky wanted to linger in the larch forests and hunt the maral deer and wild goat on the crags; the Chinese escort party urged him on and, when he would not budge, rode ahead to the next garrison. The expedition had a day or two of freedom, but messengers arrived from the governor of Hami ‘inviting’ them to hurry down.